Tag: tester

5 Traits of successful uTesters – Part 1

Originally posted at: https://www.utest.com/articles/5-traits-of-successful-utesters—part-1

The Ability to Cope with constant Change

There are many traits that testers must have in order to be successful. A quick Google search for “traits of a successful tester” will produce several articles on the subject. However in this article series, I wanted to focus on the traits that are of particular importance to uTesters.

At Applause (uTest) our approach to testing is quite unique. Testers who had success at a typical testing shop are not guaranteed to have success here. Conversely, people with no prior testing or even IT experience, often become highly respected and sought after uTesters… providing that have these particular qualities.

This will be a 5-part series and in this Part 1, we are going to discuss the importance of the ability to cope with constant change.

Probably one of the most unique aspects of being a uTester is that we test an incredibly large and ever-changing set of products. Instead of working for one company and testing the same product(s) over and over, uTesters test hundreds of different products for hundreds of customers every day. Some of the top uTesters have literally tested over a thousand different products.

The top uTesters work on several products at any given time. In order to be successful, they need to be constantly analyzing the context that they’re working in. Which product am I testing? What is the state of the product? What is the goal of this cycle? If a uTester fails to test within the correct context, they’ll find that their work provides little or no value.

Just as every product is different, so too are the needs and expectations of every customer. One customer may have extremely specific reporting standards. They require bug titles to follow a detailed format, they have attachment requirements and expect several pieces of additional data. However, the next customer may not have any requirements and is just happy to be receiving bug reports at all.

uTesters need to be able to quickly switch from context to context and from one set of customer expectations to another, often several times per day. This is no simple task, but it’s the first trait all the best uTesters share.

My First Testing Experience – Part 2

Continued from Part 1

I can vividly remember lying on my couch in my living room staring at the ceiling, my stomach in knots. I felt this huge weight on top of me making it hard to breath. I was pretty close to panicking. “How can I possibly do this? I have no idea what I’m doing. Why did I agree to this project? Do they have any idea what they’re asking? This is so unfair. This is CRAZY!” These were the thoughts racing through my mind. Before I could think one through, another would jump on the pile. That feeling of hopelessness, of being completely overwhelmed was my first and worst moment as a software tester.

I’d like to think the PM understood the magnitude of the project, that somehow she saw this amazing potential inside me just waiting for an opportunity to prove itself. But I knew she didn’t really understand what she was asking. In her mind this was a small task that any mid-level developer should be able to do. After all, it’s just testing, how hard can that be? That just added to the pressure. I was dealing with unrealistic expectations about an undefined project that required an under-appreciated amount of skill and effort.

After breathing into a paper bag for 10 minutes or so, I calmed down. I reminded myself the best way to climb a mountain is one step at a time. I started by making a spreadsheet documenting all the different migration tools we had built. I identified the base data type, the destination data type and a description of the transformation needed. One by one I went down the list, talking to the developers, searching for any documentation, looking at the old system, learning about the new one, basically doing the work a BA would have done.

Once I had a solid understanding of the specifications I was working with, I started testing. I started with the simplest cases and the ones that I was most familiar with. You are probably thinking I should have done the opposite and started with the hardest, most complicated and risky transformations. If I was doing it over today, that is the approach I would take, but considering I was a complete rookie tester, I needed to start with a small, achievable task to build some confidence and establish my testing strategy.

My strategy was pretty simple. I gathered sample source data, ran it though the migration and verified the results on the other side. Then I started adjusting the source data, trying every scenario I could think of looking for ways to make the tools fail. As I worked through my list, reporting bug after bug, it became clearer to everyone just how large this task was. Expectations slowly became more aligned with reality and the measurement for success became more reasonable.

After a few months of work, we were ready to start migrating content. It wasn’t perfect and several bugs made it through, but they were minor and due to junk source data that we didn’t care about. The migration ran for months as different sites came online. The migration tools did their job and by all accounts, the testing aspect of the project was successful.

This experience gave me an unexpected appreciation for what testing is and how valuable it can be. It gave me confidence in myself that I could accomplish a task that I really had no business even attempting. It’s an experience that I can now look back on and be proud of.

Webinar – Should testers report every bug they find?

In December of 2012, Ryan Lamontagne and I got into a good discussion on the uTest forms about whether testers should report every bug they find. We decided to kick it up a notch and debate it live in a webinar!

http://forums.utest.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=4430

Webinar – Three more uTest Panel webinars

It’s been a busy past few weeks. In addition to picking up two new enterprise customer accounts (uTest TTL work) I was a panelist for three more uTest webinars.

Maximizing Your Benefit From The uTest Forums
http://forums.utest.com/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=4985

Maximizing Exploratory Testing Methods
http://forums.utest.com/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=4984

How to be a Quiet Tester That Customers Shout About
http://forums.utest.com/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=4986

 

Some Thoughts on Functional Testing

I wrote this as a Guest Blogger for the uTest blog.

There is an age-old expression that says “You only have one chance to make a first impression.” This is a hard truth in today’s world of instant gratification. If your product fails to deliver the first time, your customers will simply move on to the next thing. In-the-wild functional testing, as provided at uTest, is similar to a dress rehearsal for your application. Your application is exposed to a group of people who accurately represent your potential user base. They can identify and report the issues (that would have negatively impacted your customer’s first impression) before your customer ever has the chance to see them.

A functional tester has the ability to evaluate individual features of an application. They are familiar with typical application behavior and have the skills needed  to look objectively at a feature and see what’s wrong.

Perhaps even more valuable is a functional tester who is able to analyze individual pieces of an application within the context of the entire application. A functional tester looks at a particular item, identifies integration points between that item and other parts of the application, and then formulates a plan of how to inspect those touch points. Applications are usually weakest in places where different parts come together. A strong functional tester knows this and knows how to exploit those weaknesses to identify any lurking bugs.

Functional testing will only be successful if an organization’s underlying quality fundamentals are solid and everyone clearly understands how testing helps achieve the goals of the business. Functional testing is only one of many activities that collectively comprise a comprehensive testing strategy. Depending on the needs and expectations of your company, different testing activities such as performance, load, and security testing should be considered. Functional testing differs from other types of testing in that it most closely reflects the experience of the users. While performance affects the experience and security issues add risk to the experience – how the application functions IS the experience.

5 Ways to Improve Your Bug Titles

I originally posted on the uTest forum here.

Bug titles are one of the most important pieces of you bug report. They are the face of your bug, they show the its value and can help or hurt the overall efficiency of the test cycle. Far too often testers don’t give their bug titles the attention they deserve. This post will try to change that. Here are 5 tips to help you improve the titles of your bug reports.

Consider Your Audience

Like the bug report itself, the title is intended to convey information. The main difference is the title is more concise. A well written title will quickly and clearly summarize the bug and its value.

To communicate this information effectively, you need to consider your audience. Bug titles are read by different audiences who may use the title for different reasons. Testers have the difficult job of writing a title that satisfies the needs of two different audiences at the same time: The customer and your fellow testers.

Customer
When the customer or Test Team Lead (TTL) reviews the bug list, one of the first things they do is look at the title. As we talked about in Reporting High-Value Bugs – Part 2, part of reporting high-value bugs is “selling” it to the customer. The title of your bug is part of your sales pitch. Always keep the title short and to the point. You want to focus on the end result, not the actions. For example:

Use “User profile – Unable to link to Facebook” instead of “Clicking the ‘Link to Facebook’ button doesn’t do anything”

Also use words that action words that convey importance such as ‘prevented’, ‘does not’, ‘inconsistent’, ‘unexpected’ etc.

Fellow Testers
Your fellow testers use the title of your bug in a very different way. They use it to determine if the bug they found has already been reported. To help them, you need to include the key words they will be searching for.

Hopefully, before you report your bug, you search the bug list see if it has already been reported. Make a note of what you searched for because those are the words you should consider including in your title.

In Reporting High-Value Bugs – Part 2 we also talked about reporting the root cause of the bug. The same is true for the title. Your title should describe the underlying problem, not one of its many possible symptoms.

Follow the uTest Standard

uTest has a crash course dedicated to Bug Title standardization so I’m going to point you there first: http://help.utest.com/testers/crash-courses/general/bug-title-standardization

To summarize that post, every bug should be broken apart into two distinct parts. The “Area” and the “Description” The area is the place in the application where the bug occurs. The description is a brief summary of the bug. These two areas should be separated by a hyphen.

For example, in this bug title:
Homepage – The ‘Contact Us’ button is linking to the incorrect page
“Homepage” is the area and “The ‘Contact Us’ button is linking to the incorrect page” is the description

This can get a little tricky when the area is deep in the application. If there was a bug in the uTest platform on the payments screen in the Account & Settings section how should we identify that area?

In the link above, one of the authors suggests you write it like this:
Account & Settings – Payments – Total payout amount is incorrect

Personally I don’t like this suggestion. Testers who do this tend to put the navigation steps in the bug titles. That is not the place for that information. Plus having more than two sections makes the title difficult to read.

I prefer to list only the broad area of the application and include the more specific area in the description. Here is how I would write this title:
Account & Settings – The total payout amount on the Payments page is incorrect

Do Not Specify the Test Environment

Many testers include the device or environment they use to test in the title of their bugs:
[iPhone 5] User profile – Unable to link to Facebook

The landscape that we test against these days is so large that it’s no wonder that this has become more common recently. Testers feel that the device they found the bug on is an important piece of information. While that is true, the title of the bug is not the right place for it.

The main reason that this is a bad practice is because it gives false impression about the scope of the bug. Generally when testers start their bug title with the environment, they are simply stating the device that they found the bug in. But the customer may interpret that to mean that this bug is only present on that device listed in the title.

Unless you have tested against every other possible device/environment, don’t include this information in the title. It adds little value and can actually cause problems.

As with most rules, there are exceptions. Here are two:

Explicitly required
If the cycle specifically tells you to include environment information in your bug titles, you should follow the instructions.

For example, this is directly from a test cycle I recently was on

NOTE – If you find an iPad bug: Please add [iPad – iOS xx] at the beginning of you bug title.

In this situation it is perfectly fine (and even required) that you include the environment in your title.

However, you may see something like this in the instructions:

BUG TEMPLATE: Please include the following info in all your bugs: Mobile device model and OS version Description of bug Wi-Fi or 3G / 4G?

This does not mean that all this information should be in the title. It simply means that it should be specified in the body of the bug. Generally you should put this information in the ‘Specified Environments’ or ‘Additional Environment info’ fields. It is the “Bug” template, not the “Bug Title” template.

Environment specific bugs are allowed
Occasionally a cycle will allow the same bug to be reported for different environments. In this case, each one of these bugs is considered different by the customer. Since the only difference between the bugs is the environment, it is necessary to include the environment in the title. Otherwise you would have multiple bugs with the exact same title and your fellow testers would have to look at the contents of the bug to see which environments had already been reported.

Keep Consistent with Earlier Bugs

Sometimes a cycle will ask you to include some extra piece of information in the title. One example of this would be the build of the application that you tested. What I usually see happen in these situations is every tester comes up with their own way of including this information. The result is a messy bug list that looks something like this:

[b 123] Area – Description
build 123 => Area – Description
Area – Description {build 123 v.2.045.34}
123 Area – Description

This is difficult for the customer and TTL to read and makes it impossible for them to quickly scan through the list.

Assuming that the earlier bugs followed the uTest standard and everything we addressed above, you should follow the pattern established in the first few bugs. Don’t worry about being original or sticking to your own personal preference, the goal is consistency. This will make the customer’s and TTL’s jobs much easier. See how much easier this is to read?

[b 123] Area – Description
[b 123] Area – Description
[b 123] Area – Description
[b 123] Area – Description

Learn From Other Testers

You can learn quite a lot from reviewing the bug reports of your fellow testers. You can see different styles of reporting the reproduction steps, come up with new ideas of how to test, and see which types of devices are the most common.

The same can be said for the bug’s title. When you are reviewing bugs, don’t just skip over the title. Instead, take advantage of the opportunity to learn from the mistakes and successes of others.

First evaluate the title of the bug first on its own:
Does the title follow the standard? Does it include appropriate key words?
Then look at it in the context of the entire report:
Does the title accurately and efficiently summarize the bug? Does it “sell” the importance of the bug?

As you pay more attention to your own bug titles as well as the titles of other bugs, you will start to see the types of patterns we have just talked about. It will become apparent that the testers who do these types of things are the ones that are separated from the crowd. Bug titles are extremely important and should be treated that way. Keep these tips in mind and you will be one step closer to writing the perfect bug report.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. What other tips can you give your fellow testers?

Is uTest a Scam?

There are some reviews out there from testers claiming uTest is a scam and that you can’t make any money. I’ve also seen a few uTest customers complain about the quality of the testing and uTest’s sales/negotiating practices. These concerns are valid and I can understand why some people have the impression that uTest is not what it claims to be. In order to address these perceptions, we need to look at them from two points of view; The view of the customer, and the view of the tester.

The uTest customer

Complaint #1: The quality of the testing was lower than expected

I have no problem saying that there are a lot of bad testers at uTest. It’s true, there is no point in denying it. These testers only report low-value bugs, they don’t follow instructions, and generally disrupt the test cycle. Sometimes it is because they’re inexperienced testers, sometimes they’re just plain bad. Unfortunately this is one of the downsides of crowdsourcing. To uTest’s credit, they do realize this and are continuously working to improve the skills and abilities of uTesters. They also identify and remove problem testers.

On the other hand there are some absolutely awesome testers at uTest. These top testers consistently provide the customer with excellent service and high-value bugs. uTest does a pretty good job of identifying the strong testers and ensuring that they are the ones working on your projects. Keep in mind that there are literally hundreds of projects, dozens of Project Managers and thousands of testers from all over the world, so every test cycle is going to be different.

So what’s a customer to do? First you need to manage your expectations. Understand the limitations and benefits of uTest and make sure they align with your testing needs. Second, you need to be involved. Yes, uTest is a service, but the quality and success of your project is a direct result of your participation and influence.

Here is an excellent article from Elena Houser on how customers can get the most from their uTest (or any crowdsourced) testing service. It is a MUST read for any potential uTest customer: http://trancecyberiantester.blogspot.com/2012/10/crowdsourced-testing-lessons-learned.html

Complaint #2: The uTest sales process is shady

In full disclosure, I’m not a uTest customer so I’ve never gone through this process myself. However, I am a uTest TTL (Team Test Lead) and so I have worked with many different customers. I’ve seen customers who are extremely satisfied and those constantly complain. It doesn’t take long before you start to see a pattern.

I really could just do a copy/paste from above. Again, this comes down to having correct expectations and being involved. Customers who follow Elena’s advice will find that uTest’s services are well worth the money and effort. Those who don’t will be disappointed with their results.

Another point worth mentioning is that uTest is a start-up company. They have only been around a few years yet they are growing and changing incredibly fast. In just the last year I’ve seen some impressive improvements. I have no doubt that as the company matures and customer needs and expectations are better understood, the sales experience will improve and mature as well.

The uTest tester

Complaint #1: uTest is a scam

As I mentioned above, uTest is a start-up. The company grew faster than many people expected and as a result it went through some obvious growing pains. Everything about the company was (and still is) evolving. The payment process was still being worked out, bug reporting and evaluation was confusing, and in general the tester experience gave some the impression that uTest was either a scam or just unprofessional.

Admittedly, the first tester interface was terrible. It was slow, buggy, and difficult to use, which is quite ironic for a software testing company. This problem has now been addressed. uTest recently launched their new tester platform and it is so much better (read more here). Their are now several reliable ways for testers to receive payment, and there is an entire team of employees solely dedicated to the welfare of the testers. These are just a few examples of how uTest is working to improve its image and show testers that uTest is a legitimate company and a great place to work.

Complaint #2: You can’t make any money

I recently read a review from a uTester that he had reported 87 bugs but he only was paid for 16 of them. The other 71 bugs were rejected. He felt that bugs were intentionally rejected in order to avoid paying the testers. He’s not the only one to complain that testers are not adequately compensated for their efforts. Fortunately it is because of a few misconceptions.

Testers need to understand the uTest bug payment model. Customers pay uTest a set price for an agreed upon amount of work. It is up to the customer to accept or reject the bugs reported by the testers. uTest then pays the testers for the bugs (and other work) the customer accepted. Since the customer pays a flat fee no matter how many bugs are reported or accepted, they have no financial incentive to reject individual bugs. Bugs are rejected for valid reasons, not to avoid paying for them.

The other important point is testers are not paid for their efforts (there are some exceptions), they are paid primarily for the value they provide. Testers who provide the customer with high-value bugs make a lot of money. Testers who report low-value or “junk” bugs make very little money.

The bottom line is good testers can make good money working at uTest. Poor testers will be frustrated.

Conclusion

uTest is not a scam. It is a legitimate company and an amazing one at that. While uTest is not perfect, most criticisms can be answered if you look at the entire situation objectively.

uTest – My First 100 Cycles

So I’m a little late, I’m actually at 138 cycles, but I wanted to give an update on my uTest experience now that I’ve got 100 cycles under my belt.

Accomplishments

When I first signed up with uTest I set a few goals. I really had no idea how realistic they were, but you have to at least have something to shoot for right?

By the end of 2012 (9 months from when I started) I wanted to:

  1. Earn my gold badge in Functional testing
  2. Become a TTL (Test Team Lead)
  3. Develop a strong reputation within the uTest community

Gold badge

I got my functional badge within 30 days of my first test cycle. At first this was actually a disappointment. I was really looking forward to the challenge of having to work hard for that badge.

After the initial shock wore off I decided that it actually was an accomplishment to be proud of. I realized that uTest has created an efficient system that allows strong testers to bubble up to the top quickly which makes sense when you think about it. Why would they want to hold good testers back? You want your best testers out front setting an example and representing the company.

TTL

Three months in, I got the email I had been anxiously waiting for; I had been invited to be a TTL! A rite of passage to become a TTL is you have to manage a sandbox class. Working that cycle was the most difficult thing I’ve done at uTest so far. Working with and evaluating 100 rookie testers, triaging their 400+ bugs and test cases in just a week is grueling to say the least. But the sense of accomplishment at the end made it all worth it. Since then, it’s been a fantastic experience working closely with the PMs while helping guide the testers so they can develop and become successful.

Reputation

My approach to this goal was to focus on the uTest form. The forum is an amazing community full of talented testers from all over the world. Every day there is are several interesting conversations going on. We constantly learn new things while challenging and encouraging each other.

After a few months of active participation, I was asked to become a uMentor and a forum moderator. Basically my role is to spark discussions and debates as well as write educational “mentoring” posts.

Before I started working at uTest maybe 10 other people knew I was a tester (That includes my mother). Now literally hundreds of people read my posts and engage in awesome discussions with me every week. So far, the conversations I’ve started have generated over 13,000 views.

I’m not sure I’ve fully achieved this goal yet, but I’m on my way.

Testing Statistics

To quantify my time at uTest so far and to brag a little 🙂 here are my digits:

  • Products Tested: 70
  • Test Cycles: 138
  • Bugs Filed: 342
  • Bug Acceptance: 93.2%
  • High Value Bugs: 47%
  • Functional Rating: 99.3% – 99.7%

You can see my uTest profile here: https://my.utest.com/platform/profile/LucasDargis

uTest Perception

Without a doubt, joining uTest has been the biggest factor in the development of my career. I have grown more in the last 7 months then I ever expected. I was able to achieve all my goals and then some.

Here is a short list of the amazing opportunities uTest provides testers:

  • The opportunity to work for every type of company. You are able to see how testing is done from start-ups to big Fortune 100 companies. Every cycle adds to your experience and helps open your mind to the many different ways testing is approached.
  • The opportunity to work with and learn from people from all over the world. I’ve made friends in the UK, India, Romania, Brazil, etc. The global exposure is priceless.
  • The uTest forum is relatively new and the number of active contributors is still small, but since the uTest community is so large (60,000+ testers) the potential is huge.  There is an excellent opportunity for testers to get in on the ground floor and quickly establish themselves in a community that is evolving into an industry leader.
  • There are several leadership opportunities. You can become a TTL, a forum moderator, a uMentor, and a Gold-rated tester. Being active in discussions on the form or in your test cycle (providing help, answering questions) are informal ways to develop your leadership skills.

You may have noticed that I haven’t talked about money at all. That is because for me, getting paid at uTest is an extra bonus. I can always make money, but it’s these other aspects that provide the most value to me as a tester.

100 cycles down. Next stop, 1000 bugs!

Quality is Customer Value – My Quest for the uTest MVT Award

One thing I respect about the uTest management is their continual pursuit of ways increase customer value. It’s an essential business objective to ensure the health and growth of our company. ‘Value’ should be the middle name of any good tester. “Lucas Value Dargis”. Sounds pretty cool huh?

I had just finished my 26th uTest test cycle. I had put an extra amount of focus and effort into this cycle because there was something special at stake. Occasional uTest offers a MVT award which is given to the most valuable tester of the cycle. The selection process takes several things into account including the quality of the bugs found, clear documentation, participation, and of course, customer value.

The MVT award not only offered a nice monetary prize, but it’s also a way to establish yourself as a top tester within the uTest community. I decided I was going to win that MVT award.

As usual, I started by defining my test strategy. I took the selection criteria and the projects scope and instructions into account and came out with these 4 strategic objectives:

  • Focus on the customer-defined ‘focus’ area
  • Report only high-value bugs
  • Report more bugs then anyone else
  • Write detailed, easy to understand bug reports
  • Be active on the project’s discussion board

When the test cycle was over I reflected on how well I’d done. I reported 9 bugs, more then anyone else in the cycle. Of those, 8 were bugs in the customer’s ‘focus’ area. The same 8 were also rated as very or extremely valuable. All the bugs were documented beautifully and I was an active participant in the discussion board.

There was no competition. No one other tester was even close. I had that MVP award in the bag. I was thinking of all the baseball cards I could buy with the extra Cheddar I’d won. I even called my mom to tell her how awesome her son was! You’ll can only imagine my surprise when the announcement was made that someone else had won the MVT award. Clearly there was some mistake right? That’s not how you spell my name!

I emailed the project manager asking for an explanation for this miscarriage of justice. The tester who won had fewer bugs, none of them were from the ‘focus’ area and they weren’t documented particularly well. How could that possibly be worth the MVT award? The PM tactfully explained that while I had done well in the cycle, the tester who won had found the 2 most valuable bugs and the customer deemed them worth the MVT award.

I was reminded that my adopted definition of quality is “Value to someone who matters” and suddenly it all fell into place. It didn’t matter how valuable I thought my bugs and reports were. It didn’t matter how much thought and effort I put into my strategy and work. At the end of the day a testers goal, his or her mission, should be to provide “someone who maters“ with the most value possible. I’m not that “someone who matters”. That “someone” is our customer.

It was a hard pill to swallow, but that lesson had a strong impact on me and it will be something I’ll carry with me moving forward. Congratulations to the MVT, I hope you enjoy all those baseball cards.

uTest Review From a New uTester

Back in March of 2012, I was listening to a podcast from SoftwareTestPro.com and they were talking about this thing called uTest. I decided to check it out.

What is uTest?

My first impression was “oh great, this is just another rent-a-tester website”, but as I looked a little closer I realized that this this company was much more powerful then I thought. uTest takes advantage of crowdsourcing (or in-the-wild testing as they call it) by distributing the work across people all over the world. In a matter of hours a website or app can be tested by dozens of different device configurations by real world users as well as professional testers.

Companies who have something they need tested hire uTest and their army of testers to perform the testing tasks. Testers are paid per bug found and per test case wrote or executed. The more valuable the customer finds the bug or test case, the more money the tester is paid.

This provides tremendous value for both companies and testers:

Companies get their products tested much quicker and cheaper then they could with in-house testers. They can have 100 testers working for one week vs. having 5 tester test for 20 weeks. Plus, they only pay for work they find valuable.

Testers get the opportunity to work on many different types of testing tasks, projects, environments and basically get exposed to things not available in their daily job. Getting paid is nice too.

Obviously there are downsides to this testing approach. For example, uTest testers don’t know or have time to learn your business or all of the intricacies of your product, so uTest shouldn’t be used when a deep level of understanding is needed. However, there are many projects where just having a hundred different eyes on on the product is exactly what is needed.

My First Test Cycle

The first project (called a test cycle) I worked on was an unpaid “interview” sandbox test cycle. This is an opportunity to try out to become a uTest tester. The task was to test NBA.com. There really wasn’t much in the way of requirements or instruction, except that you could only report 4 bugs and they had to be within the NBA.com domain. We would be evaluated on the value of our bugs and our ability to follow directions.

Since this was an audition, and I was limited to only 4 bugs I knew that each bug was very important for my evaluation. It’s hard to judge someone’s ability based on just 4 bugs so I needed to make their job easier. uTest rates bugs on a value scale: somewhat, very, and exceptionally. I wanted to be the top ranked tester in the cycle so in order to do that I thought about the assignment, the constraints, and the customer and came up with a plan.

My plan was to find different types of bugs in different locations within the site that would show my technical knowledge and testing expertise. Solid communication skills are a must in an online-based work environment so I’d need to make sure my bug reports where clear and descriptive.

Through my testing, I found dozens of bugs and I could have easily just logged the first 4 I found and been done with it. But I was very careful to make sure that I only reported those that fit into my strategy and represented my abilities as accurately as possible.

My value as a tester can be found in my strategy; how I went about finding and reporting bugs to accomplish my goal. All testing should be driven by a mission or it serves no purpose. In this case my mission was to be the highest rated tester so all my testing was done with that in mind. The actual work I did was really just “operational effectiveness” and should be expected for any good tester.

Results

  • I received the highest rating out of all 107 testers in the cycle.
  • I was the only tester who had all 4 bugs bug reports rated higher then ‘somewhat valuable’ ( I had the lone ‘exceptionally valuable’ bug report)
  • My overall uTest rank was higher then 33% of the 55,000 uTesters (Not too bad for only having 4 bug reports submitted)
Overall, I’d say my strategy worked out nicely. I don’t point this out to brag (well, not entirely), but to show the importance of a mission and a formulating a strategy to accomplish it.

Lessons Learned

From a customer’s point of view the power of crowdsourcing is amazing. The shear volume of bugs we uncovered in just a few days shocked me, especially considering how heavily trafficked that site is.

For testers, the opportunity to see the work of 100 other testers is priceless. There were several very solid testers in the cycle who had fantastic bug reports. I was able to glean some useful knowledge and techniques from reading through their reports.

The tester talent pool is sadly shallow. It surprised me just how clueless the majority of the testers were. Of the 219 bugs that were reported, 71 were rejected because the tester didn’t follow the simple instructions. It was obvious that the majority were clicking around aimlessly and reporting anything they could find.

The gap between a good tester and a bad tester is wider then I thought. Thankfully uTest takes this into account. Only testers ranked in the top 30% of the sandbox test cycle are allowed to join a paid test cycle. This allows uTest to filter out the majority of the poor testers. Also, lower ranked paid testers are limited in the amount and complexity of projects they can participate in while highly ranked testers are offered many more test cycles. This helps ensure projects have the best possible testers, keeps poor testers out, and gives new testers the opportunity to prove themselves.

I’m a now a raving fan of this company and crowd sourcing (or team sourcing as uTest calls it)!

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